The Theft
They took my ass while I was sleeping. I admit, I was sort of awake but beyond caring. Look, where did it ever get me? In youth, I was built like Gumby—reversible, really. If it weren’t for my face, you couldn’t tell if I was coming or going. There wasn’t enough to cushion my hip bones, fill out my jeans, and who wants that kind of attention, anyway? There was that jerk from Bloomfield Hills at the Aut Bar who grabbed it that time, then changed her mind. No one valued it, really, not even the thief who brought it back the next day—dumped it on my porch—what a chicken shit. I stumbled over it getting the mail, its yellow post-it note taped to one cheek, “Sorry, we made a mistake.”
Koss says, I’d definitely be the bass player of a blues band as it suits my introverted personality. But they can slouch in the background, then disappear, unnoticed, after the show while the other band members are fawned over.
In our dream band, on bass:
Koss (she/they/them) is a mixed-race, queer poet, writer, and artist with publications in Chiron Review, Michigan Quarterly (Mixtapes), Cincinnati Review (miCro), Spillway, diode poetry, Five Points, Petrichor, MoonPark Review, Beaver Mag, Sage Cigarettes, Spoon River Poetry Review, Gone Lawn, Variant Lit, Anti-Heroin Chic, San Pedro River Review, North Dakota Quarterly, Bending Genres, Bulb Culture Collective, Prelude Magazine, Reckon Review, Sugar Sugar Salt Lit, Midway Journal, and many others. They have work in or forthcoming from many anthologies including Ovation, Best Small Fictions 2020, Get Bent, Fallen, Beyond the Frame, Dead of Winter III, and Punk. They’ve received numerous award nominations and won the 2021 Wergle Flomp Humor Poetry contest and have a chapbook, Dancing Backwards Towards Pluperfect coming from Diode Editions in ’24. Find links to their work at: koss-works.com. Connect on Twitter @Koss51209969.
Ran Off With the Star Bassoon 